The shape of electronic products is becoming more complex while at the same time the size is decreasing rapidly, imposing a high demands on an organization's design and manufacturing operations. The creation of a product requires activities interconnected to form a process for the product manufacture. In the overall product realization process a research and development organization designs the product and turns the completed design over to a manufacturing organization. The manufacturing organization develops fabrication and assembly activities that enable final assembly of the product. Normally, the design, fabrication and assembly activities are executed at different intervals of time by organizations or systems that are relatively independent of each other, in that some activities are required to be completed before work can be started on other activities. The various constraints of each system or activity can cause delays or problems in the fabrication of the product, resulting in a long delay of the product realization.
The accuracy with which product concepts are communicated to the manufacturing, development, and marketing groups directly affects the likelihood that a concept will be successfully developed into a product. Benchmark studies from the communication, automotive, and aerospace industries have shown that 60-80% of the product life-cycle costs are established during the preliminary design stage. In spite of this importance in determining product cost and time-to-market, a seamless data exchange mechanism does not exist. Even though photo-realistic renderings of computer-generated models can communicate the visual aspects of a product idea very well, they are not as effective as physical models in conveying spatial ideas and the ergonomic feel of the concept. A physical model that can actually be held and put to some practical testing produces much more information and allows the designer or artist to properly validate the concept. Therefore, the timely physical production of a mock-up or prototype of an object is an important first step in the creation and evolution of a new product. The mock-up serves as a physical representation of a designer or artist's idea or concept, and it is important that this physical model accurately represent the idea. Traditionally, the mock-up or model has been fabricated by, for example, hand-crafting models from clay, balsa wood, Styrofoam, paper mache, or other types of cheap and easily manipulated materials. Other various methods of creating a model of a product are well known to those skilled in the art, as are the problems associated with each if these techniques, for example, modern machine tools are used to mill a block of metal or plastic, and more recently, a technique known as stereolithography has been used to fabricate a plastic model from a liquid resin using a laser beam. These techniques are able to create highly accurate and complex parts. However, even when using the most sophisticated computer models and machining methods, there are numerous steps that are required in moving from the concept in the artist's mind to the finished product. Also, the resulting physical representation is usually not dimensionally accurate enough or a true representation of what the actual production version of the product will ultimately be, since many compromises must be made in moving from concept to the finished prototype. Further, the time required to create the prototype is very long, typically from several weeks (in the case of a simple product) to many months (in the case of a complex product). After all this effort and compromise, only one or two of the prototypes or models are usually realized. In many cases, it would be more desirable to have multiple units that one could concurrently subject to various types of physical and marketing tests. Clearly, an improved method of making models or prototypes is needed that more accurately conveys the idea in the artist's mind, and that is faster and more cost effective, and that provides prototypes that more closely resemble products made with the actual materials and process used in the final version.